Lost films

"Cleopatra"

Left: Theda Bara in the risqué 1917 historical epic, "Cleopatra." Only
a few fragments still exist, after the only known complete prints were destroyed in fires.

According to the Library of Congress, 70 percent of films
from the silent era are lost - films which helped define the very language of
cinema, and which captured the early years of the American Century. Even movies
featuring box office stars or that were successful with audiences and critics were
not immune from falling prey to time - to deteriorating nitrate prints, to vault
fires, or to the disinterest or carelessness of studio archivists.

Film scholars around the world continue to search in
archives and private collections for missing films, with occasional success. An
early John Ford feature, "Upstream," was recently found at the New
Zealand Film Archive, while the Cinemateque Francaise has uncovered
previously-missing films by Ernst Lubitsch, Frank Capra and Tod Browing. The original Technicolor sequences from the
1925 version of "Ben-Hur" were found in a Czech film vault.

Click through the gallery to view some of the more notable missing
films, then check your attic …

Credit: Library of Congress

"The First Men in the Moon"

The British Film Institute says "The First Men in the
Moon," produced by Gaumont British in 1919, was the first film adaptation
of a story by H.G. Wells. It's one of 75 titles the BFI has included in their
"Most Wanted" hunt for missing British films.

Since the "Most Wanted" initiative was launched in
2010, a few missing films have turned up, including "Love,
Life and Laughter" (1923), located in an archive in Amsterdam; and a
1949 comedy, "Bless 'Em All," which was spotted being sold under a
different release title on eBay.

Credit: British Film Institute

"Queen of Sheba"

European prints of the Fox feature "Queen of
Sheba" (1921) featured topless scenes of star Betty Blythe. Much of Fox's
silent film archive perished in a fire in the 1930s. Only a 17-second fragment
of film identified as "Queen of Sheba" survives.

Credit: CBS News

"Human Wreckage"

After actress Dorothy Davenport's husband, Wallace Reid,
died from a morphine overdose, she co-produced and starred in an independent
anti-drug tale, "Human Wreckage" (1923). Billed as Mrs. Wallace Reid,
she starred opposite Bessie Love, and took the film on a crusading tour across
the country, speaking out in theaters, prisons, church groups, and other
organizations against the "fiendish peddlers" of drugs.

The film, like many "orphan films" produced
outside the Hollywood studio system, has not survived.

Credit: CBS News

"The Great Gatsby"

F Scott Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby" has been
filmed five times. The only version Fitzgerald lived to see was the 1926 silent
film which starred Warner Baxter as Jay Gatsby, Lois Wilson as Daisy Buchanan,
Neil Hamilton as Nick Cattaway, and William Powell as George Wilson. It was
directed as a lightweight, scandalous entertainment.

And what did the Fitzgeralds think of the film? "It's ROTTEN and awful and terrible and
we left," wrote Zelda.

Only the trailer, which features shots from a high-society
party, lovers in a clinch, and a man clutching a gun, survives.

Credit: CBS News

"The Mountain Eagle"

The most-wanted of missing films by the British Film Institute
is the second feature directed by Alfred Hitchcock. Set in Kentucky but filmed
in Germany and Austria, "The Mountain Eagle" is a romantic melodrama
starring Nita Naldi, Malcolm Keen and Bernhard Goetzke.

Shot in 1925, it was screened for the trades in 1926, then
shelved. But in 1927, in the wake of Hitchcock's subsequent success, "The
Lodger," it was finally released. Poorly received, "The Mountain
Eagle" disappeared forever.

Hitch didn’t seem to mind that it was lost. "It was a
very bad movie," he told Francois Truffaut.

Credit: Hitchcock Wiki

"London After Midnight"

The most-sought-after of lost films is "London After
Midnight" (1927), Tod Browning's silent thriller starring Lon Chaney as
the vampiric suspect in a lurid murder. Since a vault fire destroyed the last
known copy, only haunting stills such as the one at left survive to thrill and
tantalize movie buffs.

Credit: Library of Congress

"The Way of All Flesh"

Emil Jannings won the very first Academy Award for Best
Actor for his performances in "The Last Command" and "The Way of
All Flesh" (left), in which he played a bank clerk who is robbed and left
destitute, reduced to a derelict's existence. [A contemporary movie fan
magazine noted, perhaps not accurately, that the tramp's clothes he wore were
purchased from a morgue.]

Directed by Victor Fleming ("Gone With the Wind"),
"The Way of All Flesh" is a lost film, with no known copy in an
archive or private collection. It is therefore the only Oscar-winning
performance which cannot be viewed today.

Credit: Paramount Pictures

"Ladies of the Mob"

Clara Bow was one of the silent era's biggest actresses, and
she starred in the first Oscar-winner for Best Picture, "Wings"
(1927). But even her status in Hollywood couldn’t prevent half of her films
from disappearing.

All four of her features from 1928 are lost, including
William Wellman's "Ladies of the Mob" (left, with Richard Arlen),
which was reputed to feature her best performance.

Credit: Library of Congress

"The Divine Woman"

She was divine, one of MGM's most luminous stars. But Greta
Garbo's appearance in the 1928 silent feature "The Divine Woman" is
only available today in fragments.

Credit: MGM

"4 Devils"

F.W. Murnau's 1927 "Sunrise" was one of the
greatest of silent dramas. His follow-up, the 1928 circus drama, "4
Devils," starring Janet Gaynor, Charles Morton, Mary Duncan and Barry
Norton, was highly-praised. The New York Times reviewer wrote, "Not only
are the players handled with unrivalled skill, but the photography is soft and
seductive, calling attention subtly to the realism and art that pass in turn
before the onlooker."

But we'll never know. According to legend, actress Mary Duncan
borrowed the only known print from Fox's archive, and then lost it.

Credit: CBS News

"Convention City"

Before the Production Code came into effect, Hollywood films
were loose with the presentation of sex, drugs and vice. The pre-code comedy
"Convention City" (1933), featuring a sparkling cast that included
Dick Powell, Mary Astor and Adolphe Menjou, told of the boozy, seductive shenanigans
that some company employees get into during a convention in Atlantic City.

The film was banned, and enforcement of the Production Code was
stepped up in its wake, thanks to complaints about its lewdness. The nitrate negative
was junked in 1948, and the Atlantic City revelers would revel no more.